>>Yes. >>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by two Cube alumni. Please welcome Tarazi, senior vice president and CEO, networking at Dell Technologies. Welcome back. And welcome to the Virtual >>Cube. Thank you. I'm excited about this. Thank you. >>We're gonna have a good conversation, because VJ Ramachandran is also here. VP of product management at VM Ware VJ Welcome back. >>Thank you, Lisa. And happy to be here again. >>So have a lot to unpack. We're on the cusp of the emerald 2021. You guys are making an announcement We want to talk about in the Emmy. Why? It's important will break down the announcement. Go ahead and start. Uh, we'll start with you. Envy me. Why is it important? What is it? All that good stuff? >>Yeah, this is excellent topic, and this is really an important component of infrastructure these days. Um, modern applications are changing how they consume infrastructure. That's because the workloads are evolving. Some of them are ai type machine learning workloads that need very high performance. There's also a continued to end by our customers to put work clothes in public cloud and on um and create a hybrid multi cloud model. Um, and also the new exciting stuff is all have to do with the edge applications and distributing applications everywhere with automation and connectivity to where they need to be operating with, you know, on premise. Uh, so long Storey short, These trends, these new applications, how the deployment models work is really diving the need for envy me becoming the key technology for getting your data and storage and with envy me of a fabric and connectivity is starting to become a very important topic. >>How do you have those discussions with customers in terms of their next steps, especially in the last year and a half will stay with you that we've seen such acceleration of digital transformation. What have those customer conversations? How have they changed? >>Uh, they the conversations have changed in two big ways. One, they really want to discuss outcomes. They know that we can bring, you know, industry leading infrastructure and tools and automation and software. But they really want to discuss outcomes, you know? How do you How do I automate my you know, operations? How do I get to unpack the value of my data? no matter what the data is eyes and where it's coming. So so that's the first big changes. People have shifted completely to outcomes. And the second change is that now there is a really good discussion about performance and sustainability. How do I make sure that I'm meeting my sustainability goals? I'm meeting my performance goals instead of just discussing one piece of the solution. >>Got a BJ wanna bring you into the conversation? Now talk to me about BME Front and its evolution from VM Ware's perspective and some of the changes that you've seen in the last dynamic 18 months in the market. >>Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being, You know, I think that we are living in interesting times now. What we're seeing from the standpoint is that applications are evolving rapidly, demanding more performance, local agencies, higher throughput. And these are modern applications and NBA me. What we're seeing is that NBN me as a protocol is becoming the de facto sort of connected with protocol police applications at the same time. What we're also seeing is that the infrastructure team at scale and then deploy these applications at scale They are moving towards a disaggregated architecture in the data centre, and all the employees are going towards this because they want to emulate, you know, the public club. And so you know what's exciting about this announcement and sort of the, you know, the you know, what we are delivering together the bell is that the combination of Indian P plus T c p I P provides in sort of brings both these worlds together. It provides performance and legacies that these new applications these these new modern applications need at the same time provides a way that is disaggregated. And so the combination of these two is You know, it's, uh, industries changing, in my opinion, and and we'll see that this will become sort of the the fact that we can deploy infrastructure in our data centres. And that's what we're seeing in December. >>Got it? Thank you. Let's go ahead and unpack that announcement. That VJ alluded to telling them or have announced an end to end envy. Any TCP ecosystem solution back over to you. You have talked to me about this. What is it? What are some of the core components and we'll get into >>benefits. Perfect. So So we both see envy any of D c P I p as this new future storage connectivity. And it is a pivotal moment for the industry. There's always been debate about what protocols you use for connecting storage for performance speed. But the time has come for envy any of the TCP IP to become the defect of future protocol. Uh, what we're announcing is, first of all, we're announcing a new, uh, software product called S S s from Dell. And that software product will automate the discovery provisioning and automate the setup of all the storage networking How you connect all the hosts to the storage targets in a fully automated way. This is something that has been very complex, very hard to do manually in a one by one. So that's a whole new software product. Number two announcing the availability of envy me over TCP I pee on our key Dell products, which is power store power edge, which is our server product, and also power switch, which is our networking product. So the combination of the new software tool S. S s and all the availability of envy. Emile, that TCP ip on our compute storage and networking that gives customers the ecosystem to be able to use it along with the capabilities that are essential for it. >>Yeah, And DJ head was going to add to what you have just said. You know, of course, being there is fully committed to bringing this, uh, option of NBA me, You know, along with the partnership, Del, um you know, to the market and has been our partnership has been instrumental in bringing this to the market. Now, you know, the cool thing about this particular announcement and, you know, and what to bring to the market is that the smart fabric, uh, services manager is actually built into the centre. So, you know, from the understand point of this fear administrator being the administrator can so stay with them. They're the centre, um, you know, console and be able to manage provision, manage and monitor, Um, you know, in the in your fabric, uh, me or the PCP, uh, connexions. And so it's sort of bridges the gap between storage and, uh, world with you will >>and also the V sphere. The launch of, uh, envy any of the TCP I p and V. Sphere seven you see is the last component of this announcement between putting S S s inside the Centre V sphere enhancements and the Dell products. The end result is the customers get this bump and new capability. However, they can continue to use all the management tools that they have today. So this is an easy automated lift and they get this new capability >>an easy automated lift. Though that sounds like magic to I'm sure a lot of folks ears sticking with you talk to me about this is a new direction for Dell and talk to me a little bit about that and the impact. >>I think the new direction is that we have supported multiple protocols for connectivity fibre channel R d m A. But I think now, as we go to this next evolution and the fact that the world is going to multi cloud and edge and distribution, the new direction here is we're putting a lot of investment and energy, both of us into making envy me over TCP IP automated and high performance. As VJ said, we've been collaborating for over two years on this project jointly that included new standards, new innovation, new software capabilities, new divers on all our products. So although we make it sounds simple. This is a company wide on both sides. Innovation effort to make this possible. >>Absolutely a big innovation effort. DJ, Go >>ahead. And I was gonna say, you know, just to second what we have said, we work as one team you know, begin to companies. But we work as one team and really brought some innovative features and functionality out of the market and, you know, too excited to see this come to fruition. We're working on it for two years now. >>So two years before the pandemic started, I'm curious to get both of your perspectives on how the tunnels of the economy and the market of the last 18 months have influenced. We've seen so much acceleration in digital. How has this interesting time affected or accelerated what you're announcing? Or has it? >>I will start on V say, you know, whatever you'd like to add is that I think what we have seen during the pandemic is acceleration of adopting of a cloud operating model by using more of public cloud but also using automation that we have built into our products, both vm ware and L. And so this kind of automated type software tools falls completely in line with that. You know, customers more and more want the infrastructure automated and they wanted cloud light with as a service, usage based type models. And we're both invested into that area. >>Yeah, And you know, Lisa, if anything at all in the last, uh, two years since the Pandemic, what we're what we're refining is that it's no longer a decision between on Prem or Public Club, But it's actually and and decision, you know, it's on from and public clothes is truly becoming a multicultural world. And so to make this multi cloud, and then customers deploy the right applications and write workload in the right place, depending on the needs. And so, in this multiple world, having this automation and having a consistent way too, uh, to manage infrastructure, uh, in an automated fashion across these multi coloured deployments is becoming key. And so this is a key component of that. What we did, what pronouncing is a key component of that kind of a model, that customers are moving to >>it. Let's talk about the customer benefits you both mentioned performance sustainability, low latency, high throughput. Give me examples of each of those of how this technology will deliver that for customers across industries. >>This is where we've really enjoyed working together and with VJ and his team did fantastic work to test the value of having this partnership is the end to end. Customer sees the performance and benefit from the eyes of using both the software stack from Dell and VM Ware as well as the infrastructure below it. And we've been able to jointly test what the customer will see and what we have seen, which I have to say was a surprise to us. We expected benefits, but even it was one of those Aha moment. Oh my God, this is We thought it was good, but it turned out to be even better. So on the performance side, it's about 2.5 to 3 times the performance of ice crazy, which is the other technology we would compare this to on the Latin Seaside is 70% less latency and uses even less capacity in terms of CPU. We have not seen that kind of performance improvement from a protocol for a very long time. Changing networking protocols usually gives you some little benefit, but not this kind of a step functional performance. So I think the customers will be very excited about this. >>These are some numbers, PJ go ahead and extend onto that. >>No, I You know, I have nothing more to add because, you know, we having extremely encouraged by the performance numbers that you know, that we saw and, you know, and and and here, this red we actually exceeded expected our expectations, right? And if you, the enemy, was the was the right way to sort of, you know, delivered performance. But, uh, you know, to see this kind of results in real world as, uh is very encouraging. >>You guys said there are several sessions at BM world that are covering this topic. I'd like to get both of your perspectives on some of the sessions that you're presenting in and some of the key takeaways that the audience can learn. I have. We'll start with you. >>Yeah. I mean, we're starting with a session to explain the overall strategy, and we're gonna show demos. Exactly how would you use VM Ware software and L s F s s to configure Implement. How does that compare to the customer experience today? That's going to be an exciting session between myself and Paul Turner, who is the VP of product. Also at the end, where I think that that kind of with these visual demos, people will see how fast automated that is, which is really the message here. Then we have multiple sessions from our key technical experts. We're gonna go through a deep technology review of the stack and how to do it. And the functionality. >>Yeah, and Lisa on on the other side of obviously you have a number of sessions on various topics. Uh, on storage. The one that I want to call out is there's a session that I'm doing with Mark flashing who's a city or for storage and for club platform. Really. And we are discussing VMS vision and strategy for storage and availability, and NBA me is certainly a key part of that. But as we just talked earlier, the whole automation and the multiplayer aspect of, uh of the parameters it's critical. So you know. So we're sharing what? How we are approaching this whole multiple world. Um, in this, you know, with storeys and availability innovation. So I'm really excited about that. >>So a lot of news coming out on the nbn me over TCP ip front talked about the collaboration acceleration of that, the directional shift in terms of go to market and availability. When where can existing customers go to learn more information? What's the joint gtm that Del. And then we have, >>uh I think you wanna start on V sphere and I'll add or >>Okay, >>so all the products we talked about today from V sphere seven dot you the power store power edge All of them will be available starting immediately after VM World And between October and November, everything we talked about will be available And during the, um, world, we will announce how customers can use it downloaded by it. As we said before, because they are a s s s is implemented into the centre. This will be a familiar way for customers to use it downloaded and implemented, and a new lease of these fears something customers are used to. We have many customers on power store, so they will be getting a new software at least an update with the new functionality. We we do plan to care developer experience, modules, sandboxes for people to play with will make more announcements on that in the future. >>Yeah, And this, You know, as you have said, this functionality is built into, you know, the spear and recenter as well. And so the next really next release of the sphere will have this functionality. And you'll see a lot of noise about this at the world. That sort of our coming out party. Mm. >>Excellent. Well, it sounds like it's going to be a good coming out party with a lot of information to come around. The emerald timeframe, some great education and deep technical dive is that you guys and your teams will be providing to customers in all industries, which I'm sure they will be very much appreciative of. I appreciate both of you coming on sharing with me the news. What's exciting about this? The impact that's going to make and we look forward to hearing some of the news as it gets rolled out. >>Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Lisa. Thank >>you. Great to have you guys for Ihab Tarazi and VJ Ramachandran. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a cube >>conversation? Mm.

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin VJ ramen. Shannon joins me next VP of product management at VMware VJ. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you. So >>We're going to be talking about disaster recovery, VMware cloud. Dr. We've had a lot of challenges with respect to cybersecurity, but the world has in the last 18 months, I'd like to get your, your thoughts on the disaster recovery as a service, the dearest market. What are some of the key trends? Anything that you've noticed have particular interest in the last year and a half? >>Yeah, actually you're right. I mean that the last one year, since the pandemic, you know, the whole, um, lot of industries want to, uh, deploy DLR systems and want to protect themselves in France, somewhere and other, uh, other areas of the Amazon predicting that the disaster service market is going to reach about $10 billion by 2025. And so we, uh, we introduced bandwidth disaster recovery, you know, the last beam work with an acquisition of a company called atrium. And since then we've had tremendous success and it was really largely driven by two key trends that we seen in the market. One is that a lot of our customers have regulatory and mandates to do have a PR plan in place. And second is ransomware and ransomware a lot more in this interview, but ransomware is top of mind for a lot of customers. So those, these two combined together is really making a huge push to, uh, to protect all the data against, uh, disasters. >>What type of customers and any particular industries that you see that are really keenly adopting VMware cloud and D anything that you think is interesting. >>Yeah, it's actually interesting that you say it's actually not a single vertical or a size of the customer. What we have again, what we're finding is that a lot of the regulated industries, I, you know, having 92 to do the art, but the existing VR and data production systems are extremely complex and not cost effective. So, you know, customers are asked to do more with less. And so a lot of our customers, a lot of those customers are asking for, uh, looking for a cost-effective way to protect all the data. And, you know, and ransomware is not something that, that impacts, you know, any single vertical or, or any single size of customer. It impacts everyone. So we're seeing interest from all different verticals, different sizes of customers, uh, across, uh, the, you know, the B cell this, >>Yeah, you're right. The ransomware is a universal problem. And as we saw in the last few months, a problem that is really one of national public health and safety and security concerns. So you mentioned that customers from a regulatory perspective, those that need to implement Dr. Ransomware, as we talked about, are there, and then you also mentioned legacy solutions are kind of costly complex. Talk to me about some of the challenges with respect to those legacy solutions that you're helping customers to address with VMware cloud disaster recovery. >>Yeah. There are a few traits of chains that are, uh, that are emerging and then the whole data production space. One is, uh, customers want to do more with the data. And so with legacy systems, what they're finding is that customers are, you know, are able to replicate the data, but the data is sitting idle and not being used. And so, um, you know, and that's extremely, very expensive for our customers on the line. And secondly, from an outpatient standpoint, backup and Dr, as kind of merging into a single single solution and ransomware protection is becoming a critical use case as we spoke about at the talk about for that. So, uh, customers are not looking to deploy different systems for different types of production. They're looking for a similar solution that, that the lowest cost and gives them enough production across all these different use cases. >>And so where the NFL disaster recovery comes into play is that, is that we are able to use the data that we protect for other uses such as, uh, such as ransomware recovery, such as data protection, such as disaster recovery. So single copy of data that's being could be used in multiple use cases. Number one. And secondly, uh, it's a very expensive, uh, proposition to have, um, you know, on-prem to on-prem, you know, having to, you know, people who shouldn't capacity just sitting idle. And so where Vizio comes into play is that they're able to use, uh, protect the data into cloud, store it in a cost effective manner, and then just use the data when it's acquired either fatal or during disasters in ransomware. And that's where you're able to in, in, in, in the market today, >>Dig through some of those differentiators, if you will, one by one, because there's so much choice out there, there's a lot of backup solutions. Some that are providing backup only some that are doing also Dr. Depending on how customers have deployed and how they're using the technology. But when you're in customer conversations, what are the three things that you articulate about VMware cloud DVR that really help it stand out above the pack? >>Yeah, number one is the cost, right? Um, we, you know, we're able to bring down the cost of, uh, of a disaster protection, uh, by 65, by 65%. And, uh, and, you know, um, that's one big value proposition that we, uh, that we know highlight in our solution. Number two, a lot of our customers also becoming environmentally friendly and, you know, and I'm in a conscious, I should say. And so, because we're able to store the data in a more cost-effective manner, in a more efficient manner in the cloud, they're able to bring down the carbon footprint by 80% compared to regular, you know, your legacy, uh, disaster recovery and data protection solution. And the third, you know, sort of major value proposition from, from, uh, from the BMS is that, you know, we're able to integrate the, uh, uh, BCDR solution, the disaster coriander data protection solution. So well into our, um, you know, into, into the ecosystem, uh, can easily operationally easily recover data into a BM ware cloud. And so for, for the BMA ecosystem, it just becomes a natural logical extension of their, uh, their, uh, toolset. >>That's huge having a console that you're familiar with, you know, the whole point of, of backing up data and the need to recover from a disaster is to be able to restore the data in a timely fashion. I talked with a lot of customers who were using legacy technologies, and that was one of the biggest challenges backup windows weren't completing, or they simply couldn't recover data that was either, um, lost in an, in a ransomware attack or accidentally lost that recovery is what it's all about. Right. >>That's it, that's exactly right. And so at this rainbow ledger using a key enhancements and features that specifically speak to that, uh, you know, to that pain point that you just mentioned, you know, uh, we are bringing down, uh, the, uh, you know, the replication time, uh, to 30 to 30 minutes. So in other words, your Delta is, is, is, uh, is at a 300 interval now compared to all us in a traditional backup system. And number two, um, we are extending, uh, you know, be in love with a copy of it regardless it's always had with single file recovery. And so, especially for the, for the ransomware, uh, use case customers are quickly able to figure out which file leads to the restore, and they're able to restore those files individually rather than restoring their entire VM for the entire data center. And so it becomes a critical, uh, use case for, uh, critical functionality, I should say, for a ransomware recovery. And the other huge announcement of a major announcement media announcement had been made, uh, uh, others be involved is the integration into the VMware cloud in such a way that customers who move are migrating data into the BMR, the cloud on AWS can, uh, have the opportunity to, um, uh, protect the data, um, you know, uh, you know, easily BCDR and >>Got it. I'd love to get an example of a customer that you helped to recover from ransomware. As we mentioned, it's on the rise. In fact, I was looking at some cybersecurity data in the last few weeks, and it's the first half of 2021 calendar. It was up nearly 11 ax. And obviously the, the, the hockey stick lists looking like it's going to continue to go up into the right. So give me an example of a customer that you helped recover after they were hit with ransomware. >>Yeah. Yeah, I lose. And in fact, before I give you one set, one statistic that I just saw recently, um, it is, um, every Lennon are going to be across the board. There's some ransomware attack and in the world. And so, uh, you know, it is a big, you know, it is a huge, huge top of mind for a lot of, uh, the CEO's across and I, you know, across the globe now, uh, we, I just give you an example of one customer that we helped, um, you know, protect the data against ransomware. Merrick is the customer name, uh, it's a public reference. It can, um, you know, it's, it's in the BMI website and they had legacy systems, just like we talked about before they had legacy systems for protecting the data and they had, you know, backup systems and they had disaster recovery systems. >>And the big pain point was that, you know, they knew that they are, you know, they needed to protect against ransomware and, but they had two different systems backup and disaster recovery, and their cost was high because they were replicating the light data or production data, uh, you know, across different sites. And so they were looking for a, uh, to lower the cost of disaster recovery, but more importantly, they're looking to, uh, to protect themselves against potential ransomware threats and, um, and they were able to deploy VCR. And how does multiple points in time? Um, you know, I, in, in, um, in the, in the cloud that are, that allows them to go to any point, uh, you know, uh, after a ransomware attack and record from it. And as I said, the single file recovery was a huge benefit for them because they can then figure out exactly which, you know, which of those files, uh, you know, required, um, recovery. And so, um, they're able to lower the cost and protect, uh, and at the same time, uh, you know, meet the regulatory requirements and mandates to have a production in place so that the women all up there in all over the place, >>As you said, there, the data show one ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. And of course we only hear about the ones that make the news, right, for the most part, our customers talk about, Hey, we've had this problem. So it is no longer a, if we get hit with ransomware for every industry, like you were saying before, no industry is blind to this. It's when we get hit, we've gotta be able to recover the data. It sounds like what you're talking about from a recovery perspective is it's, it's very granular. So folks can go in and find exactly what they're looking for. Like, they don't have to restore entire VM. They can go down to the file level. >>That's exactly right. And, and you need the grant of the recovery because you want to be able to quickly restore, you know, your data, uh, and get back on, uh, you know, get back in the business. And so, uh, we provide that granular, granular recovery at the file level so that you can quickly scan your data, figure out which file needs to be at least a bit of cover and recollect just those files. Of course, you can also the color. We also provide authorization for the whole data center for the whole, uh, you know, BM and all the beings in the data center, but customers when they hit the trends and where they want to be able to quickly get back, get back into production, to those flights that, you know, that they critically need. And so that's, um, yeah, that's, it's a critical functionality. >>So is this whole entire solution in the cloud, or is there anything that the customer needs to have on premise? >>So this is, uh, all the data is go to the cloud in an efficient day, in an efficient way. Again, uh, you know, this is another sort of, um, like be that behalf, which is it's easy to just store data in the cloud in a debate, but what we do is be efficiently store the data so that, you know, you, uh, you know, you can know what the cost of your storage and, uh, uh, in the cloud. And so, you know, we used to be at BCDR, we'll be in the cloud disaster recovery. Those data in the cloud is, uh, and, and, and the data repository is in the cloud. And, uh, you can either recover data back to where you need to recover, or we allow filo or orchestrate automatically feel or of, uh, workloads into VMware on AWS, again, operational consistent, because it's a BMI software that's running on ground BMI software, that's running on data and you can, um, you know, fail a lot and bring the data onto the in-vitro Needham, VSO. It's, uh, uh, it's, uh, you know, and it's all there to look for SAS customer customer doesn't have to really manage anything on prem fuel, >>Which must've been a huge advantage in the last year and a half when it was so hard to get to the on-prem locations. Right. >>That's exactly right. And this is one of the clear differentiators, you know, against, uh, you know, with, um, uh, compared to the legacy systems, because in legacy backup and disaster recovery systems, you need to manage your, not just your target tourists, but also, you know, the Asians and, you know, all the stuff that, uh, uh, all the software that goes along with that, uh, data production and, uh, and the disaster recovery solution. And so by T and Matt upgrades and patches and so on. And so what we do with, with a SAS based approach is take away that burden away from customer. So we deliver this entire service as a SAS first as a cloud service first, um, uh, delivery mechanisms of customers are don't have water. You don't have to whatever any of those things. >>And that's critical, especially as we've seen in the last 18 months with what's been going on the challenge of getting to locations, but also what's been happening as we talked about in the cybersecurity space, on the increase, the massive increase in ransomware. Talk to me a little bit about, I want to dig in before we go about some of the ways that you've simplified and integrated the way to backup VMware cloud on AWS. Talk to me a little bit more about some of those enhancements specifically. Yeah, >>Yeah. So, um, a lot of the customers, customers, as you know, are, uh, you know, have a dual pronged approach where they have, you know, some workloads running on prem and they have some workloads running and the VMware cloud on AWS and for BNB, uh, for VMs that are running on VMware cloud on AWS. Um, you know, now they have a choice of, uh, of protecting, protecting the data and the VM very simply, uh, using the McLaurin disaster cloud disaster recovery. And what that means is that they don't need to have the full band BR solution, but they can simply protect the data and automatically restore and recover of data. If they, you know, if there's a corruption or something goes wrong with their, uh, you know, the beans, they can simply restore the data without going through an entire field processes. So we provide a simplified way for customers to automatically protect data, and then that are running on VMware cloud on AWS. And that's a, and it's fully integrated with our cloud on AWS, you know, workflows. And, um, and so that's a great win for anyone who's, who's migrating data man workloads into BMC >>Is the primary objective of that to deliver a business resiliency. Dr. >>Both actually that's, that's, that's, that's a great part about that. You know, that's a bit part of the solution is that customers don't have to choose between Dr and business resiliency. They get both with a single solution. They can start off, it's a specific business resiliency and protecting the data, but if they choose to, they can them, uh, you know, add BR as well to that, to those workflows. And so it's not either, or it's both. >>Excellent. Got it. Any other enhancements that you guys are announcing at the Emerald this year? >>Yeah. I just want to reiterate the announcements and the key enhancements and the making, making, uh, you know, the balancing beam. Well, um, the first one, as I said is, uh, uh, is 30 minutes RPO. So customers that are business critical workloads can now pro protect the data and be guaranteed that they're, you know, the, the, you know, the demo data, the data that they, um, you know, they lag behind it's, it's in the 30 minute range and not in the other screens, like with other legacy backup solutions. That's one. The second is the integration, uh, as all enhancements that, you know, that I just talked about for ransom recovery, single file, thin file restore. Um, they always had, you know, number of snapshots and, you know, failure was and so on, but silverish was a key and that's what they've been making for a ransomware recovery. And the third one is the integration with BNB coordinator. So the fully integrated solution and provides a simple, you know, sort of plug and play solution for any workload that's funding in being AWS. Those are the three Tiki announcements. There's a lot more in, um, in the world. So you'll see that in the coming weeks and months, but these are the three on to get the input, >>A lot of enhancements to a solution that was launched just about a year ago. VJ, thank you for sharing with us. What's new with VMware cloud DVR, the enhancements, what you're doing, and also how it's enabling customers to recover from that ever pressing, increasing threat of ransomware. We appreciate your thoughts and likewise for VJ Ramachandra and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021.

>>Yeah. Okay. Now we're going to dig deeper into HP es moral and try to better understand how it's going to impact customers. And with me to do that are Robert Christensen is the vice president strategy in the office of the C, T. O. And Kumar Srikanth is the chief technology officer and head of software both, of course, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >>Good seeing you. Thanks for having us. >>Always. Great. Great to see you guys. So, Esmeralda, kind of a interesting name. Catchy name. But tomorrow, what exactly is H P E s bureau? >>Yeah. It's indeed a catchy name. Our branding team done a fantastic job. I believe it's actually a derivation from Esmeralda. The Spanish for Emerald Berlin. Supposed to have some very mystical powers. Um, and they derived as moral from there, and we all actually, initially that we heard it was interesting. Um, so as well was our effort to take all the software, the platform tools that HB has and provide these modern operating platform to the customers and put it under one brand. It has a modern container platform. It has a persistent stories distribute the date of February. It has been foresight, as many of our customers similar, So it's the think of it as a container platform offering for modernization of the civilization of the customers. >>Yeah, it's an interesting to talk about platform, so it's not a lot of times people think product, but you're positioning it as a platform, so it has a broader implications. >>That's very true. So as the customers are thinking of this civilization, modernization containers and microservices, as you know there has become, has become the stable whole. So it's actually a container orchestration platform. It offers open source proven. It is as well as the persistence always bolted to >>so by the way, s moral, I think emerald in Spain, I think in the culture it also has immunity powers as well. So immunity >>from >>lock in and all those other terrible diseases. Maybe it helps us with covid to rob Robert. When you talk to customers, what problems do you probe for that that is immoral. Can can do a good job solving. >>Yeah, they That's a really great question because a lot of times they don't even know what it is that they're trying to solve for, other than just a very narrow use case. But the idea here is to give them a platform by which they can bridge both the public and private environment for what to do an application development specifically in the data side. So when they're looking to bring Container Ization, which originally got started on the public cloud and has moved its way, I should say, become popular in the public cloud and has moved its way on premises. Now Esmeralda really opens the door to three fundamental things. But how do I maintain an open architecture like you're referring to some low or oh, no lock in of my applications And there were two. How do I gain a data fabric or data consistency of accessing the data so I don't have to rewrite those applications when I do move them around and then, lastly, where everybody is heading down, the real value is in the AI ML initiatives that companies are are really bringing that value of their data and locking the data at where the data is being generated and stored. And so the is moral platform is those multiple pieces that I was talking about stacked together to deliver those solutions for the client. >>So come on, what's the How does it work? What's the sort of I p or the secret sauce behind it all? What makes HP different? >>Continuing our team of medical force around, uh, it's a moral platform for optimizing the data Indians who were close. I think I would say there are three unique characteristics of this platform. Number one is actually provides you both an ability to run stable and stateless were close under the same platform, and number two is as we were thinking about. Unlike analogues, covenant is open source. It actually produce you all open source government as well as an orchestration behind you. So you can actually you can provide this hybrid, um, thing that drivers was talking about. And then actually we built the work flows into it. For example, we're actually announced along with Esmeralda MLS, but on their customers can actually do the work flow management. Our own specifically did the work force. So the magic is if you want to see the secrets of is all the efforts that have been gone into some of the I p acquisitions that HBs the more years we should be. Blue Data bar in the nimble emphasize, all these pieces are coming together and providing a modern digitalization platform for the customers. >>So these pieces, they all have a little bit of a machine intelligence in them. Yeah, People used to think of a I as the sort of separate thing, having the same thing with containers, right? But now it's getting embedded in into the stack. What? What is the role of machine intelligence or machine learning in Edinburgh? >>I would take a step back and say, You know this very well. They're the customer's data amount of data that is being generated, and 95% or 98% of data is machine generated, and it has a serious amount of gravity, and it is sitting at the edge, and we were the only the only one that edge to the cloud data fabric that's built. So the number one is that we are bringing computer or a cloud to the data. They're taking the data to the cloud like if you go, it's a cloud like experience that provides the customer. Yeah, is not much value to us if we don't harness the data. So I said this in one of the blood. Of course, we have gone from collecting the data era to the finding insights into the data so that people have used all sorts of analysis that we are to find data is the new oil to the air and the data. And then now you're applications have to be modernized. And nobody wants to write an obligation in a non microservices fashion because you want to build the modernization. So if you bring these three things, I want to have a data. Gravity have lots of data. I had to build an area applications and I want to have an idea those three things I think we bring together to the customs. >>So, Robert, let's stay on customers from it. I mean, you know, I want to understand the business impact, the business case. I mean, why should all the you know, the cloud developers have all the fun? You mentioned that you're bridging the cloud and on Prem, uh, they talk about when you talk to customers and what they are seeing is the business impact. What's the real drivers for them. >>That's a great question because at the end of the day I think the reason survey that was that cost and performance is still the number one requirement for the real close. Second is agility, the speed of which they want to move. And so those two are the top of mind every time. But the thing we find in as moral, which is so impactful, is that nobody brings together the silicon, the hardware, the platform and all that stacked together work and combined, like as moral does with the platforms that we have and specifically, you know, when we start getting 90 92 93% utilization out of ai ml workloads on very expensive hardware, it really, really is a competitive advantage over a public cloud offering which does not offer those kind of services. And the cost models are so significantly different. So we do that by collapsing the stack. We take out as much intellectual property, give me, um, as much software pieces that are necessary. So we are closest to the silicon closest to the applications bring into the hardware itself, meaning that we can inter leave the applications, meaning that you can get to true multi tendency on a particular platform that allows you to deliver a cost optimized solution. So when you talk about the money side, absolutely. There's just nothing out there and then on the second side, which is agility. Um, one of the things that we know is today is that applications need to be built in pipelines. Right? This is something that has been established now for quite some time now. That's really making its way on premises. And what Kumar was talking about was, how do we modernize? How do we do that? Well, there's going to be something that you want to break into Microservices and containers. There's something you don't now the ones that they're going to do that they're gonna get that speed and motion etcetera out of the gate. And they can put that on premises, which is relatively new these days to the on premises world. So we think both will be the advantage. >>Okay, I want to unpack that a little bit. So the cost is clearly really 90 plus percent utilization. I mean, come on. You know, even even a pre virtualization. We know what it was like even with virtualization, you never really got that high. I mean, people would talk about it, but are you really able to sustain that in real world workloads? >>Yeah, I think when you I think when you when you make your exchangeable currency into small pieces, you can insert them into many areas. And we have one customer was running 18 containers on a single server and each of those containers, as you know, early days of data. You actually modernized what we consider we won containers of micro B. Um, so if you actually build these microservices and you have all anti affinity rules and you have rationing formulas all correctly, you can pack being part of these things extremely violent. We have seen this again. It's not a guarantee. It all depends on your application and your I mean, as an engineer, we want to always understand how this can be that sport. But it is a very modern utilization of the platform with the data and once you know where the data is, and then it becomes very easy to match those >>now. The other piece of the value proposition that I heard Robert is it's basically an integrated stack, so I don't have to cobble together a bunch of open source components. It's there. There's legal implications. There's obviously performance implications that I would imagine that resonates is particularly with the enterprise buyer, because they have the time to do all this integration. >>That's a very good point. So there is an interesting, uh, interesting question that enterprise they want to have an open source, so there is no lock in. But they also need help to implement and deploy and manage it because they don't have expertise. And we all know that Katie has actually brought that AP the past layer standardization. So what we have done is we've given the open source and you write to the covenant is happy, but at the same time orchestration, persistent stories, the data fabric, the ai algorithms, all of them are bolted into it. And on the top of that, it's available both as a licensed software and run on Prem. And the same software runs on the Green Lake so you can actually pay as you go and you don't we run it for them in in a collar or or in their own data center. >>Oh, good. I was one of my latter questions, so I can get this as a service paid by the drink. Essentially, I don't have to install a bunch of stuff on Prem and pay >>a perpetual license container at the service and the service in the last Discover. And now it's gone production. So both MLRS is available. You can run it on friends on the top of Admiral Container platform or you can run inside of the Green Bay. >>Robert, are there any specific use case patterns that you see emerging amongst customers? >>Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of them. So we have a really nice relationship that we see with any of the Splunk operators that were out there today. Right? So Splunk containerized their operator. That operator is the number one operator, for example, for Splunk, um, in the i t operation side or notifications as well as on the security operation side. So we found that that runs highly effective on top of his moral on top of our platforms that we just talked about what, uh, Kumar just talked about, but I want to also give a little bit of backgrounds to that same operator platform. The way that the Admiral platform has done is that we've been able to make highly active, active with a check availability at 95 nines for that same spark operator on premises on the kubernetes open source, which is, as far as I'm concerned. Very, very high end computer science work. You understand how difficult that is? Uh, that's number one. Number two, you'll see spark just a spark. Workloads as a whole. All right. Nobody handles spark workloads like we do. So we put a container around them, and we put them inside the pipeline of moving people through that basic, uh uh, ml ai pipeline of getting a model through its system through its train and then actually deployed to our MLS pipeline. This is a key fundamental for delivering value in the data space as well. And then, lastly, this is This is really important. When you think about the data fabric that we offer, um, the data fabric itself, it doesn't necessarily have to be bolted with the container platform to container at the actual data. Fabric itself can be deployed underneath a number of our for competitive platforms who don't handle data. Well, we know that we know that they don't handle it very well at all. And we get lots and lots of calls for people say, Hey, can you take your as Merrill data for every and solve my large scale, highly challenging data problems, we say yes. And then when you're ready for a real world full time but enterprise already, container platform would be happy to privilege. >>So you're saying if I'm inferring correctly, you're one of the values? Is your simplifying that whole data pipeline and the whole data science science project? Unintended, I guess. >>Okay, >>that's so so >>absolutely So where does the customer start? I mean, what what are the engagements like? Um, what's the starting point? >>It's being is probably one of the most trusted enterprise supplier for many, many years, and we have a phenomenal workforce of the both. The PowerPoint next is one of the leading world leading support organization. There are many places to start with. The right one is Obviously all these services are available on the green leg as we just start apart and they can start on a pay as you go basis. We have many customers that. Actually, some of the grandfather from the early days of pleaded and map are and they're already running, and they actually improvised on when, as they move into their next generation modernization, um, you can start with simple as metal container platform with persist with the story compared to this operation and can implement as as little as $10 and to start working. Um, and finally, there is a a big company like HP E. As an enterprise company defined next services. It's very easy for the customers to be able to get that support on the day to operation. >>Thank you for watching everybody's day volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there for more great content from Esmeralda. >>A mhm, okay.

>> Okay. Now we're going to dig deeper into HPE Ezmeral and try to better understand how it's going to impact customers. And with me to do that are Robert Christiansen, who is the Vice President of Strategy in the office of the CTO and Kumar Sreekanti, who is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software, both of course, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Good seeing you, Dave. Thanks for having us. >> It's always good to see you guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, Ezmeral, kind of an interesting name, catchy name, but Kumar, what exactly is HPE Ezmeral? >> It's indeed a catchy name. Our branding team has done fantastic job. I believe it's actually derived from Esmeralda, is the Spanish for emarald. Often it's supposed some very mythical bars, and they derived Ezmeral from there. And we all initially when we heard, it was interesting. So, Ezmeral was our effort to take all the software, the platform tools that HPE has and provide this modern operating platform to the customers and put it under one brand. So, it has a modern container platform, it does persistent storage with the data fabric and it doesn't include as many of our customers from that. So, think of it as a modern container platform for modernization and digitazation for the customers. >> Yeah, it's an interesting, you talk about platform, so it's not, you know, a lot of times people say product, but you're positioning it as a platform so that has a broader implication. >> That's very true. So, as the customers are thinking of this digitazation, modernization containers and Microsoft, as you know, there is, has become the stable all. So, it's actually a container orchestration platform with golfers open source going into this as well as the persistence already. >> So, by the way, Ezmeral, I think Emerald in Spanish, I think in the culture, it also has immunity powers as well. So immunity from lock-in, (Robert and Kumar laughing) and all those other terrible diseases, maybe it helps us with COVID too. Robert, when you talk to customers, what problems do you probe for that Ezmeral can do a good job solving? >> Yeah, that's a really great question because a lot of times they don't even know what it is that they're trying to solve for other than just a very narrow use case. But the idea here is to give them a platform by which they can bridge both the public and private environment for what they do, the application development, specifically in the data side. So, when yo're looking to bring containerization, which originally got started on the public cloud and it has moved its way, I should say it become popular in the public cloud and it moved its way on premises now, Ezmeral really opens the door to three fundamental things, but, you know, how do I maintain an open architecture like you're referring to, to some low or no lock-in of my applications. Number two, how do I gain a data fabric or a data consistency of accessing the data so I don't have to rewrite those applications when I do move them around. And then lastly, where everybody's heading, the real value is in the AI ML initiatives that companies are really bringing and that value of their data and locking that data at where the data is being generated and stored. And so the Ezmeral platform is those multiple pieces that Kumar was talking about stacked together to deliver the solutions for the client. >> So Kumar, how does it work? What's the sort of IP or the secret source behind it all? What makes HPE different? >> Yeah. Continuing on (indistinct) it's a modern glass form of optimizing the data and workloads. But I think I would say there are three unique characteristics of this platform. Number one is that it actually provides you both an ability to run statefull and stateless as workloads under the same platform. And number two is, as we were thinking about, unlike another Kubernete is open source, it actually add, use you all open-source Kurbenates as well as an orchestration behind them so you can actually, you can provide this hybrid thing that Robert was talking about. And then actually we built the workflows into it, for example, they'll actually announced along with it Ezmeral, ML expert on the customers can actually do the workflow management around specific data woakload. So, the magic is if you want to see the secrets out of all the efforts that has been going into some of the IP acquisitions that HPE has done over the years, we said we BlueData, MAPR, and the Nimble, all these pieces are coming together and providing a modern digitization platform for the customers. >> So these pieces, they all have a little bit of a machine intelligence in them, you have people, who used to think of AI as this sort of separate thing, I mean the same thing with containers, right? But now it's getting embedded into the stack. What is the role of machine intelligence or machine learning in Ezmeral? >> I would take a step back and say, you know, there's very well the customers, the amount of data that is being generated and 95% or 98% of the data is machine generated. And it does a series of a window gravity, and it is sitting at the edge and we were the only one that had edge to the cloud data fabric that's built to it. So, the number one is that we are bringing computer or a cloud to the data that taking the data to the cloud, right, if you will. It's a cloud like experience that provides the customer. AI is not much value to us if we don't harness the data. So, I said this in one of the blog was we have gone from collecting the data, to the finding the insights into the data, right. So, that people have used all sorts of analysis that we are to find data is the new oil. So, the AI and the data. And then now your applications have to be modernized and nobody wants write an application in a non microservices fashion because you wanted to build the modernization. So, if you bring these three things, I want to have a data gravity with lots of data, I have built an AI applications and I want to have those three things I think we bring to the customer. >> So, Robert let's stay on customers for a minute. I mean, I want to understand the business impact, the business case, I mean, why should all the cloud developers have all the fun, you've mentioned it, you're bridging the cloud and on-prem, they talk about when you talk to customers and what they are seeing is the business impact, what's the real drivers for that? >> That's a great question cause at the end of the day, I think the recent survey that was that cost and performance are still the number one requirement for this, just real close second is agility, the speed at which they want to move and so those two are the top of mind every time. But the thing we find Ezmeral, which is so impactful is that nobody brings together the Silicon, the hardware, the platform, and all of that stack together work and combine like Ezmeral does with the platforms that we have and specifically, we start getting 90, 92, 93% utilization out of AI ML workloads on very expensive hardware, it really, really is a competitive advantage over a public cloud offering, which does not offer those kinds of services and the cost models are so significantly different. So, we do that by collapsing the stack, we take out as much intellectual property, excuse me, as much software pieces that are necessary so we are closest to the Silicon, closest to the applications, bring it to the hardware itself, meaning that we can interleave the applications, meaning that you can get to true multitenancy on a particular platform that allows you to deliver a cost optimized solution. So, when you talk about the money side, absolutely, there's just nothing out there and then on the second side, which is agility. One of the things that we know is today is that applications need to be built in pipelines, right, this is something that's been established now for quite some time. Now, that's really making its way on premises and what Kumar was talking about with, how do we modernize? How do we do that? Well, there's going to be some that you want to break into microservices containers, and there's some that you don't. Now, the ones that they're going to do that they're going to get that speed and motion, et cetera, out of the gate and they can put that on premises, which is relatively new these days to the on-premises world. So, we think both won't be the advantage. >> Okay. I want to unpack that a little bit. So, the cost is clearly really 90 plus percent utilization. >> Yes. >> I mean, Kumar, you know, even pre virtualization, we know that it was like, even with virtualization, you never really got that high. I mean, people would talk about it, but are you really able to sustain that in real world workloads? >> Yeah. I think when you make your exchangeable cut up into smaller pieces, you can insert them into many areas. We have one customer was running 18 containers on a single server and each of those containers, as you know, early days of new data, you actually modernize what we consider week run containers or microbiome. So, if you actually build these microservices, and you all and you have versioning all correctly, you can pack these things extremely well. And we have seen this, again, it's not a guarantee, it all depends on your application and your, I mean, as an engineer, we want to always understand all of these caveats work, but it is a very modern utilization of the platform with the data and once you know where the data is, and then it becomes very easy to match those two. >> Now, the other piece of the value proposition that I heard Robert is it's basically an integrated stack. So I don't have to cobble together a bunch of open source components, there's legal implications, there's obviously performance implications. I would imagine that resonates and particularly with the enterprise buyer because they don't have the time to do all this integration. >> That's a very good point. So there is an interesting question that enterprises, they want to have an open source so there is no lock-in, but they also need help to implement and deploy and manage it because they don't have the expertise. And we all know that the IKEA desk has actually brought that API, the past layer standardization. So what we have done is we have given the open source and you arrive to the Kubernetes API, but at the same time orchestration, persistent stories, the data fabric, the AI algorithms, all of them are bolted into it and on the top of that, it's available both as a licensed software on-prem, and the same software runs on the GreenLake. So you can actually pay as you go and then we run it for them in a colo or, or in their own data center. >> Oh, good. That was one of my latter questions. So, I can get this as a service pay by the drink, essentially I don't have to install a bunch of stuff on-prem and pay it perpetualized... >> There is a lot of containers and is the reason and the lapse of service in the last discover and knowledge gone production. So both Ezmeral is available, you can run it on-prem, on the cloud as well, a congenital platform, or you can run instead on GreenLake. >> Robert, are there any specific use case patterns that you see emerging amongst customers? >> Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of them. So we have a, a really nice relationship that we see with any of the Splunk operators that were out there today, right? So Splunk containerized, their operator, that operator is the number one operator, for example, for Splunk in the IT operation side or notifications as well as on the security operations side. So we've found that that runs highly effective on top of Ezmeral, on top of our platforms so we just talked about, that Kumar just talked about, but I want to also give a little bit of backgrounds to that same operator platform. The way that the Ezmeral platform has done is that we've been able to make it highly active, active with HA availability at nine, it's going to be at five nines for that same Splunk operator on premises, on the Kubernetes open source, which is as far as I'm concerned, a very, very high end computer science work. You understand how difficult that is, that's number one. Number two is you'll see just a spark workloads as a whole. All right. Nobody handles spark workloads like we do. So we put a container around them and we put them inside the pipeline of moving people through that basic, ML AI pipeline of getting a model through its system, through its trained, and then actually deployed to our ML ops pipeline. This is a key fundamental for delivering value in the data space as well. And then lastly, this is, this is really important when you think about the data fabric that we offer, the data fabric itself doesn't necessarily have to be bolted with the container platform, the container, the actual data fabric itself, can be deployed underneath a number of our, you know, for competitive platforms who don't handle data well. We know that, we know that they don't handle it very well at all. And we get lots and lots of calls for people saying, "Hey, can you take your Ezmeral data fabric "and solve my large scale, "highly challenging data problems?" And we say, "yeah, "and then when you're ready for a real world, "full time enterprise ready container platform, "we'd be happy to prove that too." >> So you're saying you're, if I'm inferring correctly, you're one of the values as you're simplifying that whole data pipeline and the whole data science, science project pun intended, I guess. (Robert and Kumar laughing) >> That's true. >> Absolutely. >> So, where does a customer start? I mean, what, what are the engagements like? What's the starting point? >> It's means we're probably one of the most trusted and robust supplier for many, many years and we have a phenomenal workforce of both the (indistinct), world leading support organization, there are many places to start with. One is obviously all these salaries that are available on the GreenLake, as we just talked about, and they can start on a pay as you go basis. There are many customers that actually some of them are from the early days of BlueData and MAPR, and then already running and they actually improvise on when, as they move into their next version more of a message. You can start with simple as well as container platform or system with the store, a computer's operation and can implement as an analyst to start working. And then finally as a big company like HPE as an everybody's company, that finance it's services, it's very easy for the customers to be able to get that support on day to day operations. >> Thank you for watching everybody. It's Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Keep it right there for more great content from Ezmeral.